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Since World War II, the US has operated a large military base in the central part of Okinawa — a now-crowded island city in Japan's southernmost prefecture. More than half of about 50,000 US service members in Japan are stationed on Okinawa.

Now, the US and Japanese governments are planning to move the Marine base to a more pristine place — the rural fishing village of Henoko. There's already a small base there, but locals are waging a major fight against the expansion.

A violent message was delivered to Minnesota’s Muslim population early Saturday morning. At 5:05 a.m. local time, an improvised explosive device went off inside an imam’s office at the Dar Al-Farooq Islamic Center in Bloomington, Minnesota.

About a dozen worshipers were gathered nearby in the mosque for morning prayers, but no one was injured in the explosion. Congregants called the attack a hate crime, a sentiment echoed by Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton.

Ziynda Kamte says she looked out the bus window the whole way to Cape Town.

She says she never stopped looking back. She was terrified that he would pop into her view, coming to get her and their two kids.

“My husband — he changed,” Kamte explains. “He started being abusive, beating me, treating me like nothing. There were days in which he would come home at 4 a.m. And he just wanted us to jam into it, and make love.”

Eastport, Maine, earned its name because it's the easternmost port, and city, in the United States. It’s just a three-minute boat ride from Canada. The city has survived more than 200 years living off the sea, a constant tale of reinvention.

From a peak population of just more than 5,000 in the year 1900, the city has dwindled to an estimated 1,352 residents. Today, a handful of restaurants dot its tiny downtown. During winter, they’re mostly closed.

From the very first minutes of the new documentary “Liberation Day,” Norwegian director Morten Traavik is out to challenge your assumptions about North Korea.

Scenes of screaming mobs at the height of Beatlemania. Rock stadium crowds waving in sync to Queen's Freddy Mercury. A young fan's hysterics at Michael Jackson's embrace. These images are interspliced with scenes of North Korean military marches and crowds behaving madly for their Dear Leader, currently Kim Jong-un.

Two videos emerged recently on Kenyan social media: One appeared to be from the BBC, the other from CNN. Both claimed that incumbent President Uhuru Kenyatta was way ahead in the polls for the presidential election on Tuesday.

Facing limited internet options, high costs and low speeds, Cubans are creating workarounds to get online.

Since 2014, the government has opened hundreds of public Wi-Fi hot spots for Cubans and tourists who visit the island. But for many Cubans, the costs to get online are too high. And when they do, many find the connection speeds too slow.

In physics, the Standard Model describes how particles like quarks, leptons and bosons should interact. But as a review paper detailed in the journal Nature in June, recent experiments at particle colliders around the world have turned up anomalies that the rule book doesn’t quite account for.

For centuries, South Asia has had its own Khawaja Sira or third gender culture. The community, identifying as neither male nor female, are believed by many to be "God’s chosen people," with special powers to bless and curse anyone they choose.

The acceptance of Khawaja Sira people in Pakistan has been held up internationally as a symbol of tolerance, established long before Europe and America had even the slightest semblance of a transgender rights movement.

You may not know what a Quindar tone is, but you have definitely heard one.

Quindar tones are the beeps heard in the background of famous space communications, like Neil Armstrong’s “the Eagle has landed” message to Mission Control when the lunar module first reached the moon.

The first time Zain Alam’s music video was screened in public, at a symposium hosted by the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA) in Philadelphia in April, an elderly Sikh woman approached him in tears.

Alam was nervous. He had created the music video as part of the "Where We Belong: Artists in the Archive” project, an initiative to encourage artists to use SAADA’s collection — photographs, videos, letters and publications that date all the way back to the late 1800s — to create works that bring to life histories often overlooked by cultural heritage institutions.

Earth’s forests are crucial for controlling the rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and for maintaining biodiversity, so efforts are underway around the world to stop deforestation. But what happens when those same trees are also crucial to a family’s livelihood?

One solution being tried in countries like Costa Rica and Uganda is to pay landowners not to cut down their trees.

On a cloudy summer day, Iowa farmer Wendy Johnson lifts the corner of a mobile chicken tractor — a lightweight plastic frame covered in wire mesh that has corralled her month-old meat chickens for a few days — and frees several dozen birds to peck the surrounding area at will. Soon, she’ll sell these chickens to customers at local markets in eastern Iowa.

The demand for beef, pork and chicken raised on smaller farms closer to home is growing. Now, some Midwest farmers, like Johnson, are exploring how to graze livestock to meet those demands while still earning a profit.

Residents of Rio de Janeiro are spending its one-year Olympic anniversary processing the news that the State University of Rio, one of the nation’s best, has suspended classes for the second semester due to the budgetary crisis.

Thousands of police have been taken off Rio’s streets in the past year, city clinics are closing their doors, and there has been dismal interest in patronizing Rio’s $20 million Olympic golf course — built on an environmental reserve — and the almost completely unsold luxury housing that was once the athletes village.

Each week on The World, we feature a unique selection of music. And most every week, we put together the highlights for you here.

WALK-OFF MUSIC FOR AN OLYMPIC STARJamaican sprinter Usain Bolt is currently the fastest man in the world. And this weekend, at the World Athletics Championships in London, Bolt will run his final 100 meters. There are years of musical tributes to him.

At a glance, Thailand seems an unlikely destination for North Koreans seeking to defect from their abusive state.

For starters, the two nations are separated by about 3,000 miles. Most of that distance is consumed by China, which tends to scoop up intruding North Korean refugees and ship them back home, where they face grim retaliation in gulags.

Yet each year, hundreds and sometimes thousands of North Koreans make this grueling overland journey from their frigid homeland to the tropics of Southeast Asia.